Goethe himself,
limpidly perfect as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in giving
artistic coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper qualities wholly
out of the question, Wilhelm Meister seems a mere aggregation of episodes
if compared with such a masterpiece as Paul and Virginia, or even with a
happy improvisation like the Vicar of Wakefield. The second part of
Faust, too, is rather a reflection of Goethe's own changed view of life
and man's relation to it, than an harmonious completion of the original
conception. Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it certainly is;
but if we look at it as a poem, it seems more as if the author had
striven to get in all he could, than to leave out all he might. We cannot
help asking what business have paper money and political economy and
geognosy here? We confess that Thales and the Homunculus weary us not a
little, unless, indeed, a poem be nothing, after all, but a prolonged
conundrum. Many of Schiller's lyrical poems--though the best of them find
no match in modern verse for rapid energy, the very axles of language
kindling with swiftness--seem disproportionately long in parts, and the
thought too often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in the
sevenfold coils of diction, dappled though it be with splendid imagery.
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